Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015

Marcin Wichary dissects a fascinating bug where Medium users were unable to type just one of the Polish language’s 32 characters: Ś. It all starts with rather ancient technology used in somewhat more modern times:

I grew up in Poland. My first computer — the glorious Atari 800XL—was an original 1979 technology, repackaged in 1983. We got it in 1986. Used.

The circumstances causing this bug are simply amazing, and detailed well by Wichary.

In an amusing side-note, the Ś character actually makes a “shh” sound. On Medium, it was so silent that it disappeared entirely.